Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today I want to ask you, what are the seven great myths of church history? Seven great myths of church history. There are more than seven, believe me, but I've chosen seven of the bigger ones to treat here as we prepare for our church history course.

Indeed, that is coming up. God has decided, He has determined that He's going to save a people for Himself in history, real time and space. And so church history is important to your understanding. But there are seven great myths of church history that I want to dispel, even as we anticipate our church history course. And that is going to begin then on Thursday, October 14th.

That's a Thursday evening. And it'll start at 7 p.m. at Leo's Place in Idaho Falls. And I would just encourage you to come and join us. I'm very excited about this. We've got an excited group as well, anticipating unfolding their heritage throughout church history.

And I just encourage you to join us. Maybe you've been curious about who we are, who I am, what I'm about. And you'll get a taste of that in our church history course, beginning Thursday, October 14th at 7 p.m. at Leo's Place. We'll have a party room. Hopefully, there'll be somewhat of a jovial atmosphere, not a party per se, but a very friendly atmosphere in which to look at your past heritage in church history.

And we'll be using Dr. Bruce Shelley's book, Church History in Plain Language. Still the best layman's church history book out there. And get a copy before you come. I may have a few copies available for sale, but I would just encourage you to go ahead and order your own church history in plain language by Dr. Bruce Shelley. And come and join us.

But as a kind of a preparation for that time, I'm covering the seven great myths of church history. And we treated three of them last week. That is, church history doesn't matter. That's the first myth. Church history doesn't matter.

All that matters is what I believe today, right? We dispelled that myth. And then we also dispelled the second great myth. I can leap over 2,000 years of church history and do things exactly like the perfect, pristine New Testament church of Peter, Paul, and the apostles. And I can do it like they did it in the book of Acts.

And that is a common mystery. That is a common myth that we find in churches, especially many contemporary churches. And we dispelled that myth. And you can find all of these on our radio programs that are cataloged at our radio website. And I'll give you that in a minute.

But our third great myth that we dispelled last week was that the true church of Christ disappeared in apostasy at some point in history and has only been recently restored, right, by a variety of prophets. That's a common myth that you find in primitivism. That's the idea that we can go back and restore a lost golden age of the church. And we dispelled that myth. And you can review all of these radio programs.

We have them cataloged on our website for the radio spots. And that is found at omnispotestas.org. Let me spell that. That's Latin for all authority. That's omnispotestas.org.

And it's O-M-N-I-S dash P-O-T-E-S-T-A-S dot org. And there you'll find years of our radio programs cataloged, but especially this first one on the seven great myths of church history. And you'll find the first three catalogued there at that website. Well, let me continue then with the fourth of the great seven myths of church history that I want to help dispel before we even start our church history course. And that fourth myth is the Catholic Church has always been the same.

One monolithic, unbiblical, and apostate church. Oh, apostasy seems to be a great theme through all of this, isn't it? That is number four. The Catholic Church has always been the same. One monolithic, unbiblical, and apostate church.

This myth is a kissing cousin with the previous one. And many Protestant evangelicals, no good Catholic would say that, of course, but many Protestant evangelicals believe that whenever they hear the word Catholic, that immediately means the Church of Rome with a pope and a superstitious mass with crucifixes and funny hats and a laundry list of works that one must do to be saved rather than being saved by grace through faith. Well, they, of course, believe that such has it been from the beginning, is today, and ever shall be. Amen. Right?

The fourth great myth of church history is that the Catholic Church has always been the same. One monolithic, unbiblical, and apostate church. Now, before we go any further, let me remind you that I am a Christ-centered, believing Presbyterian who holds to the authority of the Bible, not a pope, and I will live and die as a Protestant, or pronouncing it differently, a protestant, that is one living in protest to the Roman Catholic Church. And I believe that the Reformation of the 16th century was a long overdue necessity for the Church when it finally came.

And men like Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Knox, they all brought the Church back to her biblical roots, and we're all better off for it. Well, then, you might say to me, Mr. Evangelical, how can you then say anything good about the Catholic Church, Mr. Smarty-Pants Pastor? Or how can you say that it's been anything else than one monolithic, unbiblical, and apostate church? Well, I call it a myth precisely because I'm a student of church history. I was a church history major for my Master of History at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

And as such, I know that the Church of the New Testament has kept its roots and has kept its integrity and faithfulness since the days of the apostles. There has always been a true church on the face of the earth. And conversely, I know that the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church that we see before us today with the Pope at the Vatican in Rome and priests and rosaries and funny hats and endless Hail Marys. Well, that's not the same church that's been through all of church history. That's why we study church history to sort these things out.

Let me first define several of my terms as well before we go on dispelling this myth. First of all, the term Catholic. Now, that term Catholic, small c Catholic, means universal. It means all-encompassing. And we can call the early church Catholic precisely because it was universal.

All believers belong to the same church of Peter, Paul, and the apostles. There were no denominations as we know them today. Even today, we can call the church universal, composed of all true believers who are united to the body of Christ, regardless of their denomination. And we can call this the Catholic Church, small c. This is what we mean at New Geneva. When we confess in the Apostles' Creed, for example, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.

We're merely speaking of all true believers united to the body of Christ, regardless of denomination. So, Mr. Smarty Pants Evangelical, do not distort this teaching just because you have never thought past your nose about the nature of the church or because you have a superstitious reaction to the word Catholic. Let me also define the term Roman Catholic. Roman Catholic, that's a different story. This is the denomination of Catholicism that so many evangelical Protestants confuse with the broader church universal.

And it is identified as Roman Catholic because over time, the Bishop of Rome claimed supremacy over the bishops of all the other churches of the world. So, it's important to remember the qualifier over time. It did not happen overnight. Now, so many believers, excuse me, have naive, simplistic thinking about what happened soon after the Apostle Paul died.

No sooner, the story usually goes something like this, and I'm exaggerating a little bit, so bear with me, but the story goes something like this, that no sooner had Paul been laid six feet in the ground when a guy in a robe and a funny hat with a rosary in his hand jumped out from behind a bush and said, aha, I'm Pope Godfather or something like that, and I'm taking over here, see? And the people just kind of rolled over, and ever since then, we've had the Catholic Mass and rosaries and Hail Marys and eating fish on Fridays.

And sometimes a person will look a little deeper, maybe, and see that the Roman Catholic catechism teaches that a person's works justifies it before God. Or they may also discover the doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist actually becomes Christ's body and blood. That's, in sum, the doctrine of transubstantiation. And they also see that these are vital tenets of the Roman Catholic dogma.

But what must remain clear in our heads, dear believer, is that the Catholic Church of the Apostles was the same church the day after the death of the last apostle that it was the day before his death and for centuries after that. And the death of the last apostle was the apostle John, who died early in the second century. But the day he died, the apostolic church before his death was the same church after his death and for many centuries afterwards. The myth of some kind of pope godfather who bullied unsuspecting believers into worshiping Mary and all the other stuff is just that, a naive evangelical myth.

And we hope to dispel this myth even further with you in our church history course, which is, of course, beginning Thursday, October 14. And it will start at 7 p.m. at Leo's Place. And we'll begin and every Thursday thereafter at Leo's Place at 7 p.m. We will commence again with a new lesson. And we're going to be doing this probably right on through the month of May. So we'll have a whole semester, two semesters, really, to study this issue.

And that myth, the evangelical myth, that some kind of pope godfather, right, who bullies unsuspecting believers right after Paul dies and bullies them into things like worshiping Mary or handling rosaries, praying rosaries, that is just that a naive evangelical myth. Let me point out several things with you. First of all, the church of the early church fathers, and by the church of the early church fathers, we mean approximately A.D. 100 to A.D. 325, when the first council of Nicaea was called.

The church of those early fathers is a true and faithful church in which we could find Christ and in which we could faithfully worship, dear believer. That early church preached and prayed and suffered. They loved one another and enemy alike. And slowly, soul by soul, this church of the church fathers spread the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. And they collected and they copied and they preached the writings of the apostles, which would later become our New Testament.

And they did all of this and much more, being utterly faithful to the very same gospel of the apostles. We have extensive writings from them that definitively answer this for us, dear listener. Let me give you one example. I would highly commend to you the book. It's called The Justification Reader by Thomas Oden.

The Justification Reader by Thomas Oden, O-D-E-N. And in this volume, Dr. Oden carefully reviews the writings of the church fathers, excerpting extensively. And he shows how the doctrine of justification by faith alone was taught and preached by them, the church fathers. And what Dr. Oden does for justification can be replicated with other major doctrines of the faith. There has always been a true church teaching true doctrine and practicing true worship. And secondly, we must also note the church of Rome only began to aggressively assert its preeminence in the mid-5th century under Pope Leo the Great.

This is a nugget of church history you have to get straight in your mind, dear evangelical Christian. Not until the middle of the 5th century under Pope Leo did Rome begin to aggressively assert its preeminence. Before that, every church was equal to any other church. And when they gathered to meet to find solutions to practical and doctrinal issues in early forms of presbyteries, these gatherings, these meetings, they were presbyteries. That's one reason we call ourselves Presbyterians.

Well, then those representative leaders, the elders and the bishops, were all of equal standing. No one church's voice or vote was more important or carried more weight than another. But gradually over time, and we'll cover this in our church history course, gradually over time, some of the bigger cities began to carry more influence, cities like Jerusalem or Antioch or Rome or Constantinople and Alexandria. But Rome was never thought to be preeminent among them. But for a variety of reasons, which we will cover in our church history course, for a variety of reasons, the bishop of Rome began to assert his primacy among equals.

And Pope Leo the Great put it on steroids, if you will. But even then, it would take more centuries before that was finally achieved. And we have the Roman Catholic Church that we have today. And then note with me as well, all of the doctrines that we associate with the Roman Catholic Church took many centuries to morph from the orthodoxy of the apostles to what we see today. For example, transubstantiation became an official dogma.

That is, you had to believe this. It didn't become dogma until the Council of Trent in 1563. 16 centuries transpired before transubstantiation became dogma or papal infallibility. When do you think that became official doctrine? It wasn't the day after Paul died.

No, it was 1870, declared by Pope Pius IX at the First Vatican Council. 1870, before papal infallibility came into dogma. And then, or another example, the sinlessness of Mary. When do you think that became official dogma of the church? The sinlessness of Mary, or her immaculate conception, as it's called.

That wasn't until 1854. And on and on we could go. The bottom line is, what the Catholic Church believed and practices is not always the same as what the Roman Catholic Church came to believe and practice. These two are not the same. And you, dear listener, dear evangelical believer, you have much more in common with the Catholic Church than you may at first assume.

That Catholic Church, small c, is and was composed of pastors and elders and deacons and believers of many convictions, stretching over the entire two millennia of church history. You will not only worship with all of them in heaven before the throne through all eternity, but you would have found yourself worshiping with the Catholic Church. In the second century, for example, before you were all thrown into the Colosseum to be killed by lions, you would have found yourself worshiping with the Catholic Church in Gaul in the fourth century after being converted from pagan tribal human sacrifice.

You would have also found yourself worshiping with a Catholic Church under Charlemagne, a king who began to supply churches in his kingdom with priests who could actually read a Bible and write coherent sermons. And you would have found yourself worshiping with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, in great cathedrals or faithful gospel preaching priests. And yes, there were those faithful gospel preaching priests who would teach the Bible to the illiterate people like you. You would have been an illiterate peasant most likely in those days.

There was only a two percent literacy rate throughout the Middle Ages, and you would have been probably illiterate, one of those great unwashed 98 percent. And you would need a gospel preaching priest who would teach the Bible to you using the stories of the Bible in stained glass windows and statues and paintings. They were teaching tools. They weren't being worshiped, okay? So in our church history course, we will show you how God has been faithful in making a true church across the span of some 20 centuries and hundreds of cultures, making a church composed of the one body of Christ, the church universal.

Yes, the Catholic Church. That's you. That's me. That's all true believers who ever lived or will live. Well, let me tell you that we will be doing this in our church history course, which we will be studying and taking up on October 14th.

That's a Thursday night at 7 p.m. And we'll be meeting at Leo's Place. We'll have a party room there, and you can look for us then at Leo's Place on October 14th and every Thursday thereafter, beginning at 7 p.m. And we just encourage you to pick up the book, Church History in Plain Language by Dr. Bruce Shelley. And you can call me for more information or just let me know you're coming. I'd like to have an idea of how many people we're going to have. So you can call me and let me know you're going to be there.

Call me at area code 208-523-0196. Well, our fifth great myth of church history is this, number five. Things like creeds, confessions, catechisms, elaborate liturgies, and deep theology are basically a waste of time. All I need is Jesus in my Bible. Yes.

Oh, that's a common, common one, especially among lazy evangelicals. Things like creeds and confessions and catechisms and elaborate liturgies and deep theology, these are all basically a waste of time. All I need is Jesus and my Bible. I've had this said to me so many times. Well, just let me say to begin with that Jesus and your Bible, that's a good start.

I am not demeaning that at all. But what kind of life is it that fails to apply that Bible to your life? In fact, every area of your life. And what are the consequences when you do? Christ and his book then begins to affect your thinking and your acting in the world.

Patterns and habits and ways of living develop and you begin to account for them to yourself and others and you write them down. You organize them so you can remember them and repeat them. Then it is that others, your spouse, your children, your friends and fellow believers, they can live the biblical truths you have discovered. In addition, you learn from them how Jesus and the Bible has transformed and shaped them and you can apply it to your own life too. That way, you don't have to reinvent the wheel as the cliche goes every time a new situation in life comes up for you.

You have the advantage of someone in the past, a situation in life that has been experienced by another believer in history. And by writing down your understanding of that truth in life, you also provide understanding for living to the next generation from Jesus and the Bible. This really, in its simplest form, is what theology is. By theology, I mean the study of God. That is what theology means.

Theos meaning God and logos meaning a study of. Theology in its broadest sense is really nothing more, nothing less than Jesus and your Bible encountering the real world in history and you recording the consistent effect of that encounter for yourself and others to come. In this sense, every true believer is a theologian. You might as well set yourself to be the best theologian you can be and disabuse yourself of this myth that things like creeds and confessions and catechisms, elaborate liturgies and theology are basically a waste of time. All you need is Jesus and your Bible.

That's a myth. For example, the Bible clearly asserts the divine nature of Jesus. The Word made flesh. In the beginning was the Word, John says, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Now that's a glorious truth that God has revealed to us, one that will transform our lives when we make it a part of our daily living.

It is then that we begin to ask questions like, well, who is this Word and what is He like? What does it mean that the Word is God? Why is it necessary for this to be true? On and on we could go. The minute you begin to ask and answer these questions, which the very first believers did, then you begin to make theology.

Certainly, you have your basic text of truth that is the Bible. But in answering those questions and applying them to daily life, you begin to generate understandings of that truth. Things like confessions of faith and creeds and catechisms and systematic theologies are nothing more than the orderly arrangement and clear presentation of that understanding. And they are necessary, too. They are necessary to a real living of Jesus and your Bible.

That's because Jesus and your Bible have been interacting with the real world for over 2,000 years now. And true believers have not been lazy in leaving us a record of that interaction either. Confessions and creeds and catechisms, liturgies and theologies, not to mention church histories. And you'd be nowhere without them. Your life, your morals, your society, your culture, even your government have all been shaped and influenced by these things for over 2,000 years now.

By analogy, in 1905, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in which he disclosed his core discovery of mass and energy equivalents in the formula E equals mc squared, right? Bingo! That paper helped to transform our fundamental understanding of the universe and brought us everything from the atom bomb to the iPhone. No one said, all I need in life is a copy of Einstein's paper on relativity and E equals mc squared, did they? Au contraire, that would be incredibly naive and stupid.

We'll see how long it takes you to create an iPhone or a nuclear reactor to heat your home with just Einstein's paper and a rudimentary understanding of E equals mc squared. Instead, that basic text has generated greater and greater understanding as it is applied to every area of life. And as a consequence, we have hundreds of subsequent texts that arrange in orderly fashion that understanding, and we do it in clear presentations.

Additionally, those fundamental texts, including those you use to master your field of study if you're an engineer, for example, these texts have generated whole wings of libraries filled with further knowledge that even helped to construct those modern library wings in which they're deposited. Well, this is a rough analogy to what you and your Bible have done in the world as that Bible has interacted with the souls and lives, right? Believers throughout redemptive history, it has created confessions and creeds and liturgies and theologies that have shaped your understanding without your even being aware of it.

If you believe the myth I just outlined for you, and just as you could no more pick up your iPhone to call and leave an indignant message if you disagree with me without that previous history of physics, well, so I suggest to you that you could no more go to church this Sunday and worship with fellow believers and do so in spirit and in truth without that previous history of theology in the history of the church. It has shaped you more than you realize. This is also why a study of church history, that is things like confessions and creeds and catechisms and theologies, it is so important.

It helps you understand a little more what has brought you to this point in your Christian life and help you this Sunday as well when you go to be with your fellow believers and worship in spirit and truth. You can do so in part because of what previous generations have given you and handed you in their study of Jesus and their Bible, right? Well, join us for that study. I encourage you to go ahead and join us at New Geneva. We will be meeting for our church history course beginning on October 14.

That's a Thursday night at 7 p.m., and we'll begin every Thursday thereafter at 7 p.m. at Leo's Place. We'll be taking up our church history course, and you can call me for more information on the course and let me know you're coming by calling area code 208-523-0196. And New Geneva also meets for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. Come and join us then. 10 a.m. on Sunday morning at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. And you can call us for more information at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.